"Congratulations, take a moment and then let's get back to work!" "This is just the first great flight," Aung said. They flew three more times that day, each one higher and farther than the last, she added. "History does tell us that soon after their first flight, Orville and Wilbur did go right back to work," Aung said today of the Wright Brothers' famous experiment at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, on Dec. If Ingenuity aces those next two flights, sorties four and five could be "really adventurous," she added. The helicopter will likely go slightly higher and farther on flights two and three, getting up to 16.5 feet (5 m) off the ground and moving a maximum of 165 feet (50 m) downrange, Aung said during a news conference earlier this month. Ingenuity will fly again soon, if all goes according to plan - up to four more times, in fact, during its month-long window. Related: How NASA's Mars helicopter Ingenuity can fly on the Red Planet For example, Ingenuity gets its bearings during flight in real time by analyzing the photos snapped by its navigation camera.
Ingenuity flew as planned with the modified command sequence, becoming the first robot ever to ply Mars' thin, dusty skies.ĭon't assume from this focus on commands, however, that Ingenuity is a mindless drone the little robot is capable of significant autonomy. The fix was effective, as this morning's flight shows.
"It is the most straightforward, since we do not have to change its configuration." "This solution is the least disruptive to a helicopter that, up until we identified the watchdog issue, has been behaving just as we expected," Aung wrote in a blog post Saturday (opens in new tab). NASA's Mars Helicopter Ingenuity team celebrates after seeing a view of the drone's first flight on Mars captured by the Perseverance rover on Apas they watched from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. On Saturday (April 17), Aung announced that the team was confident it had found a fix - an adjustment of the command sequence beamed from Earth - and set today as the targeted first-flight date. The mission team initially pushed the flight back to April 14, then delayed it again to troubleshoot the issue further. But the chopper suffered an issue with its "watchdog timer" and failed to transition into flight mode as required by the test. Those carbon-fiber blades were supposed to spin at about 2,400 revolutions per minute - the rotational velocity they achieve during operational flight - while Ingenuity remained on the ground. The 19-inch-tall (48 centimeters) helicopter sailed through its preflight checks until the final one, an attempted high-speed spin test of the craft's twin, 4-foot-long (1.2 m) rotors on April 9. Ingenuity carries no scientific instruments, though it is equipped with a black-and-white navigation camera and a 13-megapixel color imager.
That campaign is not focused on gathering data it's meant only to prove that the feat is possible. This still image from NASA's Perseverance rover on Mars shows the Mars Helicopter Ingenuity hovering above the Martian surface during its historic first flight on April 19, 2021. "You know I'm hugging you virtually," Aung told her team. Aung sent them all remote hugs of success. There's also a piece of their Wright Flyer plane on Ingenuity to mark the event.īecause of COVID-19 pandemic restrictions, much of Ingenuity's mission team watched today's event via a WebEx video conference. NASA named Ingenuity's Martian airfield Wright Brothers Field after Orville and Wilbur Wright, who performed the first heavier-than-air flight on Earth in 1903. "We've been talking so long about our Wright brothers moment on Mars, and here it is." "We can now say that human beings have flown a rotorcraft on another planet!" Aung said as her team cheered. Every planet, she's said in the past, gets only one first flight. MiMi Aung, Ingenuity's project manager, triumphantly tore up her contingency speech (written in case of a failure) and hailed Ingenuity's historic feat on Mars. They stood, threw up their hands and cheered as the flight's success was confirmed. The core team behind Ingenuity's pioneering flight watched today's Mars flight from a control room at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. An image captured by the Ingenuity Mars helicopter shows the vehicle's shadow on the surface of the Red Planet during its historic first flight on April 19, 2021.
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